Wind energy is part of a multi-scale energy-assemblage that is composed of different actors, materials and concepts. It is not only place that is multi-scalar, but also time: In wind energy projects, the future is being made – different actors envision different futures for themselves, their community or companies, the country or even the world.
These actors are diverse in their motivations, goals and skills. Politicians, investors, scientist or citizens are involved and contribute with their own expertise. However, the expertise of local citizens is often excluded from official visions of the future by politicians etc. because it is not perceived as legitimate. As a result, local resistance is often seen as an obstacle rather than an opportunity to improve and diversify the vision of the future.
New approaches to promote local acceptance are therefore about specifically incorporating local knowledge and local visions of the future in order to enable cooperative shaping of the future.
This project assumes that knowledge/expertise and future-oriented action are intertwined. That is to say: One’s own vision of the future is shaped by knowledge of climate change and energy transition. Collecting and applying this knowledge is in turn guided by one’s own (expected and desired) vision of the future.
In addition, questions about the legitimacy of the knowledge gained and the perception of this legitimacy by the knowledge bearers themselves and by society also play a role – since at the moment, (scientific) expertise is losing more and more authority and knowledge hegemonies are being broken up. How knowledge and expertise will be legitimized in the future, regardless of pure status attributions such as “scientific”, is being negotiated in projects such as PartEEnschaften.
Based on this, the project will investigate how different actors build, legitimize and use their expertise and future-shaping practices. Of particular interest here is how actors with an expertise legitimized through discourses of science and politics, etc. and those with subaltern expertise (local citizens) differ in their practices.
A particular focus will be on how the various experts negotiate their knowledge and their visions of the future with each other within the context of the project in order to create a common imaginary.
The research is intended to contribute to the debates in the fields of future anthropology, energy anthropology and public anthropology as well as to show ways in which the negotiation of specialist knowledge can create space for a just energy transition.